1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a stocked product sensing system. More specifically, this invention relates to a stocked product sensing system for determining the level of product availability and/or identification of product items on a product display.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Sales facilities, such as, for example, retail grocery stores, stock products available for sale to customers on product displays. Product displays typically include one or more shelves, mounted to cooperative support members, for supporting products placed thereon. Product items are typically arranged such that one or more types of product items are displayed on each shelf. Customers identify the product item or items they want to purchase and remove the desired item or items from the shelf. Out-of-stock items result in lost sales and thus lost revenues and/or frustrated customers. As such, sales facilities must monitor the level of product availability on product displays to prevent and/or reduce out-of-stock items.
Despite various efforts to prevent or reduce out-of-stock conditions, the world-wide grocery industry currently suffers from about 8% of out-of-stock situations.
Previous efforts to check for out-of-stock items have been based on one or more of the following initiatives: a) manual checks performed by store clerks, which is an expensive and inefficient process that results in inaccurate and unreliable data; b) using RFID technologies, which are currently expensive to implement, specifically because they require expensive tags to be placed on individual items; c) modeling potential demand in stores through statistical algorithms, which, however, has only less than 75% accuracy; and d) using statistical models based on sales data to determine out-of-stock conditions, which also suffer from inaccurate measures and/or false out-of-stock alarms.
There is a need or a desire for a stocked product sensing system allowing for more accurate determination of the level of product availability on a product display and/or identification and/or configuration of product items on the product display and capable of producing low stock alerts in real time.